Tens of thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants in California speak Mixteco and other indigenous languages.
Despite laws requiring medical facilities to offer interpretation, indigenous patients often have no information in their language as they try to navigate virus-related medical care.
Germaine Omish-Lucero’s ancestors were taken from their homes and forced to build California’s Mission San Luis Rey de Francia—a mission in what is now Oceanside, California—about 200 years ago. There, they were exposed to diseases such as measles, to which they had no immunity.
As a new tragedy—the coronavirus pandemic—grips the globe, what can we learn from indigenous leaders like Omish-Lucero about resilience?
Across the state, groups that serve immigrant and ethnically diverse populations are scrambling to meet a sudden surge in demand for coronavirus-related information in languages other than English.
While state and local authorities do provide translations of some information, particularly in more widely-spoken languages such as Spanish, there remain huge gaps in what is available, particularly given the speed at which news and policies around the coronavirus are developing.